Rescuing Manner/Result Complementary from Certain Death∗
E. Matthew Husband
University of South Carolina
CLS 2011 Annual Meeting, April 7th
1
Introduction
Constraints on the meanings of words is of central interest to the field of lexical semantics.
• There is a hypothesis in the domain of verb meanings: Manner/Result Complementary.
• A verb only lexicalizes a manner or a result, but not both (Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2010).
Some theory issues about manner/result complementary:
• What does it mean for a verb to lexicalize a meaning?
• What kinds of meaning does lexicalize cover?
Some empirical issues for manner/result complementary:
• Manner of death verbs appear to encode both a manner and result meaning (KoontzGarboden & Beavers 2010).1
(1)
M ANNER OF D EATH V ERBS: asphyxiate, behead, crucify, hang, decapitate, disembowel,
drown, electrocute, eviscerate, gas, guillotine, hari kari (seppuku), immolate, impale, poison,
quarter, strangle, . . .
Roadmap
i. Briefly review the Manner/Result Complementary Hypothesis and its relationship to manner
of death verbs
ii. Note two classes of manner of death verbs
iii. Observe an asymmetry between manner of death verbs’ manner and result meanings
∗ I would like to thank the Michigan State Semantics Group for useful discussion and comments which has helped
develop the analysis presented here.
1 The verbs listed in (ia) are questionably manner of death verbs. Some speakers accept assassination, for instance, as a
manner with the result of death, placing assassinate in with other manner of death verbs. Also, the verbs in (ib) are
similar to manner of death verbs, though they assert some magnitude of death. As the precise list of manner of death
verbs is not directly at issue here, I will set aside the treatment of these cases for future research.
(i)
a.
b.
assassinated, dispatch, murdered, sacrifice, slay, . . .
annihilate, decimate, eradicate, exterminate, extirpate, massacre, obliterate, slaughter, . . .
1
E.M. Husband
iv. Reformulate Manner/Result Complementary and highlight some consequences
v. Conclude
2
2.1
Manner/Result Complementary and Manner of Death Verbs
Manner/Result Complementary
Eventive verbs can be classified as manner or result verbs.
• Manner verbs (2a) specify the manner of carrying out an action.
• Result verbs (2b) specify the resulting state of carrying out an action.
(2)
a. M ANNER V ERBS: nibble, rub, scribble, sweep, flutter, laugh, run, swim, . . .
b. R ESULT V ERBS:
clean, cover, empty, fill, freeze, kill, melt, arrive, die, . . .
Manner and result are found in complementary distribution (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1991, 1995,
2006).
• At issue: The lexicalized components of meaning (Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2010)
– These components are lexical entailments (Dowty 1991), and
– “. . . must be entailed in all uses of (a single sense of) a verb, regardless of context.”
(Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2010: 23)
(3)
2.2
Manner/Result Complementary: Manner and result meaning components are in complementary distribution: a verb lexicalizes only one. (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2010)
Manner of Death Verbs
One possible counterexample to Manner/Result Complementary comes from manner of death verbs
(Koontz-Garboden & Beavers 2010).2
(4)
Shane drowned/hanged/electrocuted/crucified Sandy.
• These verbs seem to have both a manner and a result component to their lexical meaning.
– The manner component: A particular manner of action happened to the individual.
– Ex.: Drowning/hanging/electrocution/crucifixion happened to Sandy.
– The result component: The individual died.
– Ex.: Sandy died.
Koontz-Garboden & Beavers (2010) adopt the following tests laid out by Rappaport Hovav & Levin
(2010).
2 Levin & Rappaport Hovav (2010) note other possible counterexamples in Férez (2007), Goldberg (2010), and Zlatev &
Yangklang (2004).
2
CLS 2011: Manner/Result Complementary and Death Verbs
• Tests for manner component:
– Selectional restrictions on the subject - manner verbs more restricted than result verbs
– Denial of action - harder to deny manner verb action than result verb action
– Complexity of action - given a two point scalar change result, the presence of durativity
indicates a complex manner
• Tests for result component:
– Denial of result - contradiction if a verb encodes a result
– Object deletion - unacceptable for result verbs
– Restricted resultatives - result verbs more restricted than manner verbs
They argue that manner of death verbs display positive results for both result and manner tests and
thus have both manner and result components to their meanings.
• Question: Do manner of death verbs constitute a true counterexample to the Manner/Result
Complementary Hypothesis?
• In preview, some do, but they suggest an interesting revision to the hypothesis.
– First, there are two classes of manner of death verbs, of which only one carries a lexical
entailment for both manner and result.
– Second, even for this class, the status of the manner and result meaning differ.
3
Classes within Manner of Death Verbs
Manner of death verbs constitute two classes which have different aspectual properties.3
• Interruptive interpretations of for x time modifiers.
– Like kill (5), Class I manner of death verbs block an interruptive interpretation (6).
– Unlike kill (5), Class II manner of death verbs allow an interruptive interpretation (7).
– With this interruptive interpretation, the result component is not present.4
3 Speakers may vary in their judgments concerning the aspectual properties of particular manner of death verbs. For
instance, hang behaves like a Class I manner of death verb for some speakers and a Class II manner of death verb for
others with respect to interruptivity and to death resultatives.
(i)
Saddam Hussein was hung %for a minute/%to death.
4 This assumes that the result component is related to death. Since alive/dead is a two-point scale, the result component
of Class II verbs is tied to a telic event. See Appendix A for some discussion of these issues.
3
E.M. Husband
(5)
(6)
(7)
North Korea killed two civilians
#for an hour.
a. King Louis XVI was guillotined
#for 30 seconds.
b. Cicero was decapitated
#for 10 minutes.
c. Dafydd ap Gruffydd was quartered
#for several days.
d. Thích Quǎng Dúc immolated himself
#for an hour.
e. Terrorists beheaded Daniel Pearl
#for 3 minutes.
a. The state of Florida electrocuted Ted Bundy for 30 seconds.
b. Joe Delaney drowned
for 5 minutes.
c. Richard Montague was strangled
for a minute.
d. Michael Hutchence asphyxiated himself
for half a minute.
e. Napoleon was poisoned
for years.
• Acceptability with resultative to death.
– Like kill (8), Class I manner of death verbs block the resultative to death (9).5
– Unlike kill (8), Class II manner of death verbs allow the resultative to death (10).
(8)
(9)
(10)
North Korea killed two civilians
#to death.
a. King Louis XVI was guillotined
#to death.
b. Cicero was decapitated
#to death.
c. Dafydd ap Gruffydd was quartered
#to death.
d. Thích Quǎng Dúc immolated himself
#to death.
e. Terrorists beheaded Daniel Pearl
#to death.
a. The state of Florida electrocuted Ted Bundy to death.
b. Joe Delaney drowned
to death.
c. Richard Montague was strangled
to death.
d. Michael Hutchence asphyxiated himself
to death.
e. Napoleon was poisoned
to death.
Class I (guillotine, decapitate, behead, . . . )
Incompletive *for x time
Resultative
*to death
Class II (electrocute, drown, strangle, . . . )
for x time
to death
• Class I manner of death verbs are achievements.6,7
• Class II manner of death verbs are activities/accomplishments.
5 Koontz-Garboden & Beavers (2010) propose that the resultative to death with manner of death verbs is acceptable as
redundantly expressing the resulting death state for manner of death verbs. However, given the oddity with kill, the
acceptability of a redundant resultative to death is questionable.
6 Important in terms of the composition of telicity (Krifka 1992; Verkuyl 1972), in x time modification is acceptable even
when the internal argument is not quantized, a further indication of the achievement status of Class I verbs (Mittwoch
1991).
7 Rothstein (2004) notes that, when well formed, the progressive distinguishes between achievements and accomplishments (i) – progressive achievements (ib) have a paraphrase with about to which denotes a detached activity not found
for progressive accomplishments (ic). Some Class I manner of death verbs follow this same pattern (ii); however, there
are other ill-behaved Class I manner of death verbs which lack this paraphrase (iii).
4
CLS 2011: Manner/Result Complementary and Death Verbs
– Class II manner of death verbs do not violate Manner/Result Complementary since
their result component is not constant across all contexts.
– In particular, the event structure of the predicate determines whether a result is present.8
What about Class I?
4
Assertions and Presuppositions of Manner of Death Verbs
Class I manner of death verbs appear to have a lexical entailment for both a mannar and a result,
regardless of event structure.
• But the kind of meaning each of these two components expresses is different.
• Claim: The manner component is an assertion, the result component is a presupposition.9
4.1
The Manner Component is Asserted
The manner component of manner of death verbs does not project out of questions (11) or negation
(12).
(11)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
Was King Louis XVI guillotined?
Was Cicero decapitated?
Was Dafydd ap Gruffydd quartered?
Did Thích Quǎng Dúc immolate himself?
Did terrorists behead Daniel Pearl?
Yes, he was killed by a guillotine.
No, he was stabbed.
Yes, he was cut up into four pieces.
Yes, he set himself on fire.
No, he was shot in the back of the head.
• In each case, the question is asking about the manner in which the individual died.
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
a. ??John is finding a penny on the ground.
b. The train is arriving.
c. The boy is painting a picture.
a. King Louis XVI was being guillotined.
b. ?Herennius is decapitating Cicero.
c. ?Terrorists were beheading Daniel Pearl.
a. Dafydd ap Gruffydd was being quartered.
b. Thích Quǎng Dúc is immolating himself.
→ The train is about to arrive.
6→ The boy is about to paint a picture.
→ King Louis XVI was about to be guillotined.
→ Herennius is about to decapitate Cicero.
→ Terrorists were about to behead Daniel Pearl.
6→ Dafydd ap Gruffydd was about to be quartered.
6→ Thích Quǎng Dúc is about to immolate himself.
I leave an account for these ill-behaved Class I manner of death verbs for future research.
8 Rappaport Hovav & Levin (2010) distinguish between result and telicity, arguing that results are scalar changes on
either two-point or multi-point scales, where two-point scalar changes are necessarily telic while multi-point scales may
not be. However, it is unclear exactly what the result of atelic multi-point scalar changes are, and certainly more must
be said about the form a result may take, especially for atelic interpretations of degree achievements (i).
(i)
The water cooled the reactor fuel rods for a few minutes.
a. 6→ The reactor fuel rods became cool.
b. → The reactor fuel rods became cooler.
9 Note that both assertions and presuppositions can be lexical entailments (Dowty 1991). As such, Class I manner of
death verbs are counterexamples for the original specification of manner/result complementary given in (3).
5
E.M. Husband
• Thus answers which affirm the manner or deny it and propose a different manner are
acceptable.
(12)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
King Louis XVI wasn’t guillotined.
He was strangled to death!
Cicero wasn’t decapitated.
He was stabbed!
Dafydd ap Gruffydd wasn’t quartered.
He was drawn and hung.
Thích Quǎng Dúc didn’t immolated himself. He died in his sleep.
Terrorists didn’t beheaded Daniel Pearl.
He was killed by firing squad.
• Negation can negate the particular manner being asserted by the verb in question.
• Thus proposing a different manner is acceptable.
4.2
The Result Component is Presupposed
The result component of manner of death verbs projects out of questions (13) and negation (14).
(13)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
Was King Louis XVI guillotined?
#No, he didn’t die.
Was Cicero decapitated?
#No, he didn’t die.
Was Dafydd ap Gruffydd quartered?
#Yes, he was killed.
Did Thích Quǎng Dúc immolate himself? #No, he didn’t die.
Did terrorists behead Daniel Pearl?
#Yes, he died.
• The question cannot be asking whether the individual died.
• Answering in the affirmative or negative with respect to the death results in oddity.
(14)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
King Louis XVI wasn’t guillotined.
Cicero wasn’t decapitated.
Dafydd ap Gruffydd wasn’t quartered.
Thích Quǎng Dúc didn’t immolate himself.
Terrorists didn’t behead Daniel Pearl.
#He remained King of France for years.
#He lead the revolution against Caeser.
#He escaped to France.
#He’s alive in Vietnam.
#He’s an active journalist in the Middle
East.
• The result cannot be directly negated.
• Following direct negation with an alternative in which the individual lives feels like skipping
a step in the discourse.
5
What for Manner/Result Complementary?
Class I manner of death verbs do have both a manner and a result component to their lexical
meaning.
• The manner component is asserted, and the result component is presupposed.
• Manner/result complementary is sensitive to the kind of meaning.
6
CLS 2011: Manner/Result Complementary and Death Verbs
– This suggests a revision to the initial hypothesis for manner/result complementary.
Manner/Result Complementary (revised): Manner and result meaning components are in
complementary distribution with respect to a kind of meaning: A verb can assert only one.
(15)
Some consequences and questions:
• Given (15), do we expect to find classes of verbs which assert their result and presuppose
their manner?
– Yes.
– But event structure may interact with the process of lexicalization to prevent certain
combinations from arising easily.
• Is manner/result complementary one facet of a wider ranging constraint?
– In addition to manner/result complementary, manner/path complementary has also
been argued for (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995; Talmy 2000).
– Can words assert more than one component of their meaning?10
– What are the limits, if any, on the number of presuppositions lexicalized by a word?
• Why do languages seem to have few classes which lexicalize a manner and result component?
– Languages may prefer to minimize the number of meaning components within a single
root if allowed by the morphology of the language.
– Morphologically poor languages like English may provide more opportunity for lexicalizing several components of meaning.
10 Verbs seem to always assert only one component of their meaning, with all the other meanings forming some kind
of presupposition. For instance, acquiesce has at least two components to its meaning (i), but only one appears to be
asserted as observed with questions (ii) and negation (iii).
(i)
(ii)
(iii)
Bill acquiesced to our demands.
a. Bill accepted our demands.
b. It was difficult for Bill to accept our demands.
Did Bill acquiesce to our demands?
a. No, Bill did not accept our demands.
b. ?No, it was easy for Bill to accept our demands.
Bill did not acquiesced to our demands.
a. He did not accept a single one.
b. ?He found it easy to accept our demands.
Similarly, the oft-used word bachelor only asserts the “unmarried” meaning component (iva). All the others
(“human” (iv-v,b), “male” (iv-v,c), “of marrying age” (iv-v,d), “not been married before” (iv-v,e), “possibility of
marriage” (iv-v,f)) are presupposed.
(iv)
Is Jessie a bachelor?
a. No, he’s married to Clare.
b. #No, he’s a humpback whale!
c. #No, Jessie’s a girl!
d. #No, he’s a five year old!
e. #No, he’s a divorcée!
f. #No, he’s the catholic priest!
(v)
7
Jessie’s not a bachelor
a. He’s married to Clare.
b. #He’s a humpback whale!
c. #Jessie’s a girl!
d. #He’s a five year old!
e. #He’s a divorcée!
f. #He’s the catholic priest!
E.M. Husband
– In Dutch, some Class I manner of death verbs have a prefix: verdrinken ‘drown’/drinken
‘drink’, verstikken ‘asphyxiate’/stikken ‘choke’, onthoofden ‘decapitate/behead’/hoofden
‘head’ (but, cf. ophangen ‘hang’/hangen ‘hang’ and wurgen ‘strangle’).11
6
Conclusions
The insights of formal semantics must be considered in the pursuit of a proper formulation of the
constraints on lexical meanings.
• Potential counterexamples suggest avenues for refining our hypotheses.
– Manner of death verbs push the manner/result complementary hypothesis in an interesting direction.
• Distinguishing between assertion and presupposition is key in understanding the scope of
the constrains on word meanings.
– Verbs are constrained to assert only one component of their meaning.
References
Dowty, David. 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67(3). 547–619.
Férez, C. 2007. Human locomotion verbs in English and Spanish. International journal of English
studies 7(1). 117–136.
Goldberg, A.E. 2010. Verbs, constructions and semantic frames. In Syntax, lexical semantics, and
event structure, 21–38. Oxford University Press.
Koontz-Garboden, Andrew & John Beavers. 2010. Manner and result in the roots of verbal meaning.
Krifka, Manfred. 1992. Thematic relations as links between nominal reference and temporal
constitution. In I.A. Sag & A. Szabolcsi (eds.), Lexical matters, 29–53. Cambridge University
Press.
Levin, B. & M. Rappaport Hovav. 1991. Wiping the slate clean: A lexical semantic exploration.
Cognition 41(1-3). 123.
Levin, B. & M. Rappaport Hovav. 1995. Unaccusativity: At the syntax-lexical semantics interface.
The MIT Press.
Levin, B. & M. Rappaport Hovav. 2010. Lexicalized meaning and manner/result complementarity.
In B. Arsenijević, B. Gehrke & R. Marín (eds.), Subatomic semantics of event predicates.
Levin, Beth & Malka Rappaport Hovav. 2006. Constraints on the complexity of verb meaning and
vp structure. In S. Gärtner, R. Beck, R. Eckardt, R. Musan & B. Stiebels (eds.), Between 40 and
60 puzzles for Krifka. Berlin: ZAS.
Mittwoch, Anita. 1991. In defense of Vendler’s achievements. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 6.
71–84.
Rappaport Hovav, Malka & Beth Levin. 2010. Reflections on manner/result complementarity. In
Malka Rappaport-Hovav, Edit Doron & Ivy Sichel (eds.), Syntax, lexical semantics, and event
structure, 21–38. Oxford University Press.
11 Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this observation.
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CLS 2011: Manner/Result Complementary and Death Verbs
Rothstein, Susan D. 2004. Structuring events: A study in the semantics of lexical aspect. Blackwell
Publishing.
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics II: Typology and Process in Concept
Structuring. MIT Press.
Verkuyl, Henk J. 1972. The compositional nature of the aspects, vol. 15, Foundations of Language
Supplementary Series. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Zlatev, J. & P. Yangklang. 2004. A third way to travel: The place of Thai in motion-event typology.
In S. Str omqvist & L. Verhoeven (eds.), Relating events in narrative 2: Typological and
contextual perspectives. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ.
A
Influences from World Knowledge
For even Class I manner of death verbs, certain contexts can be constructed where it is unclear that
the result of death itself obtains for even Class I manner of death verbs.
(16)
a.
b.
c.
d.
The chicken was beheaded but continued to run around the yard.
The starfish was quartered and grew into four little starfish.
Jason decapitated the hydra but it continued to fight.
The asbestos monster immolated itself but it did not die.
There appears to be a strong world knowledge bias to the result of death from manner of death verbs
that can be overridden.
• Koontz-Garboden & Beavers (2010) argue that the exact result component is not important.
– Even if a result of death does not come from manner of death verbs, some result does
obtain.
– Ex.: “[E]ven if guillotine does not entail death, it does entail loss of the head, and
therefore a result” (7).
– Ex,: Crucify has at least a change of location result, since “one has to be hung upright
in a particular configuration in order to be crucified” (7).
• However, by this logic, even for some “hard core” manner verbs, some kind of (scalar) result
obtains.
– Nibble entails some consumption scale result (17a).
– Wipe entails some friction scale result (17b).
(17)
a. The squirrel nibbled at the apple #but the apple remained whole.
b. Mary wiped the table
#but no friction resulted.
• Determining what the (scalar) result is is a non-trival (and at present, unclear) process.
9
E.M. Husband
B
What counts as a meaning?
How the system determines the primitives of meaning is a particularly difficult issue which I side
step throughout this talk.
• Certainly manner meanings and result meanings have intuitive differences.
• But knowing that a particular manner meaning or result meaning would count as primitive
is not clear.
– For manner of death verbs, is the result component the individual died the primitive,
or is it something more basic/idiosyncratic to the verb, i.e. behead → the individual
lost a head.12
Consider the example in (18):
• For saunter, is walk primitive? What about move?
(18)
Sally sauntered down the street.
a. The way Sally walked down the street was by sauntering.
b. The way Sally moved down the street was by sauntering.
These have different status with respect to questions and negation.
(19)
a.
Did Sally saunter down the street?
i. No, Sally walked down the street.
ii. ?No, Sally moved down the street.
b. Sally didn’t saunter down the street.
i. She walked down the street.
ii. ?She moved down the street.
• Saunter and walk seem to reside on the same level of meaning for this example; whereas
move is treated differently.
• Does this suggest that move is a (more) primitive meaning?
E. Matthew Husband
Department of Psychology
Barnwell College
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
[email protected]
12 Note that what unifies manner of death verbs as a class is the result component, the individual died.
10